Palestinians vote in elections, Hamas challenges

RAMALLAH - Palestinians yesterday voted in their first parliamentary elections in a decade, a ballot that could bring the militant Islamic movement Hamas into the government for the first time.

Thousands of police with automatic rifles guarded polling stations across the West Bank and Gaza after weeks of armed chaos in Palestinian areas had threatened to delay the election.

Calm prevailed as Palestinians cast ballots, but security officials were taking no chances. "We have been instructed to use force against anyone who tries to disrupt the election process," policeman Ibrahim Mahmoud said in Ramallah.

Israeli officials caution that a win for Hamas, behind suicide bombings and officially committed to destroying Israel, could herald an end to peacemaking. The United States, which brands Hamas a terrorist organisation, is also concerned.

Polls show Hamas, standing on an anti-corruption platform in its first run for parliament, just a few percentage points behind President Mahmoud Abbas' long-dominant Fatah party.

Both groups have said they would consider forming a coalition government if Hamas made a strong enough showing. In Gaza, Hamas supporters wearing the group's trademark green hats and bandannas deployed outside polling stations. "We are coming to make a change for the better. We want to change the government," said Hamas supporter Baher al-Rayes, 23.

Some 1.4 million people in the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem were eligible to vote for the 132-member Palestinian Legislative Council. Election officials said they expected a high turnout.

Voters were choosing from among 11 party lists across the Palestinian areas and more than 400 candidates running locally in the first parliamentary elections since 1996.

About 900 foreign observers, led by former US President Jimmy Carter, were monitoring the process.

The main militant groups had pledged to prevent trouble.

"These elections will be a step on the way to freedom, achieving our independence and building our state," Abbas, elected a year ago, said in a televised address on Tuesday.

Israeli troops pulled back from Palestinian population centres to avoid accusations of interfering in the polls in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

But Israel kept its forces on a high alert to prevent attacks by Islamic Jihad, a group boycotting the ballot and which carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last Thursday.

Though its charter calls for Israel to be destroyed, Hamas has largely followed a truce for nearly a year in a five-year-old Palestinian uprising, and a senior official said this week that indirect talks with Israel were "not taboo".

Hamas was expected to capitalise on Fatah's image for corruption and mismanagement. The Islamist group has gained popularity not only for its fight against Israel but for its charity work in Palestinian areas.

If Hamas does well enough at the polls, it could be offered cabinet seats under a power-sharing arrangement.

Abbas hopes once Hamas enters parliament it might be prepared to disarm, a process that is meant to start under a US-sponsored peace "road map" designed to produce a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel.

Israel insists on disarmament of militants before any talks can begin. But Hamas has made clear it has no intention of giving up its weapons, no matter what the election outcome.

On the eve of the Palestinian vote, the United States reiterated it view of Hamas as a terrorist group, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington would have practical problems dealing with Hamas because of this classification.

Interim Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in his first policy speech since assuming the powers of Ariel Sharon who suffered a stroke on January 4, said he hoped the Palestinian poll would deliver a government ready to follow the road map.

Olmert, widely favoured to win Israel's March 28 election, said Israel had to give up some West Bank land and quickly set a border with the Palestinians. He pledged to keep Israel's road map promise to remove unauthorised settler outposts. But he stirred Palestinian concern with a hint Israel would set a border by itself if talks failed.

- REUTERS